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What Is Zeitgeist? Examining Period-Specific Cultural Patterns LSE Research Online URL for This Paper: Version: Published Version What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns LSE Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/100076/ Version: Published Version Article: Krause, Monika (2019) What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns. Poetics, 76. ISSN 0304-422X https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.02.003 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ [email protected] https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ Poetics xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Poetics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/poetic What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns☆ Monika Krause Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Current research on culture rarely differentiates explicitly between period-specific and other Zeitgeist kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of “zeitgeist” as a tool for sociological Generation analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices Culture that is specific to a particular historical time-period, links different realms of social life and social Cultural sociology groups, and extends across geographical contexts. As such zeitgeist sensitises us to a phenomenon Historical sociology that can be described independently of and alongside other cultural phenomena such as trans- Fashion fi Karl Mannheim historical schemas or binaries or group-speci c patterns. Dissociated from an idealist tradition in historiography, which makes strong assumptions about periods as coherent entities, tends to allocate one zeitgeist to one period, and assumes that zeitgeist is held together by the coherence of a set of ideas, zeitgeists can be described and compared according to their formal properties: We can ask how zeitgeists extend in time and social space and by what media and socio-material carriers the patterns of zeitgeists are held together. 1. Introduction When we encounter discussions about the "post-truth era" or the "age of me-too", we encounter claims about epochal trends or period-specific cultural patterns. Such claims are quite common in public debate, the media, and in some traditions of cultural analysis; yet, as I shall argue, we currently lack the conceptual tools to frame such claims as accountable sociological hypothesis and subject them to systematic investigation in the context of other sociological concepts. Some sociologists have participated in diagnosing epochal trends using labels such as "post-modern society" or "neoliberalism". These accounts usually focus selectively on what they claim is new in the present era - a tendency that Mike Savage and Fran Osrecki have criticised as sociological "epochalism" (Calhoun, 1993; Osrecki, 2011, 2015; Savage, 2009). Research in cultural sociology on the other hand, rarely differentiates explicitly between historically specific and other kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of “zeitgeist” - literally "spirit of the times" - as a tool for sociological analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices that is specific to a particular historical time-period, links different realms of social life and social groups, and extends across geographical contexts. As such, the concept of zeitgeist sensitises us to a set of phenomena, which can be described independently of and alongside other cultural phenomena such as trans-historical schemas, binaries, or group-specific patterns. By developing zeitgeist as an analytically specified concept among other concepts, I want to contribute to a more fine-tuned vocabulary for social and cultural analysis. I also want to "provincialize" the patterns that the ☆ The author would like to thank Michael Guggenheim, Susanne Hakenbeck, Klaus Nathaus, Fran Osrecki, Theo Jung, Arvind Rajagopal, Henning Trueper, and Fred Turner for discussions that have shaped this argument. Three reviewers and the editor provided very thoughtful criticisms and suggestions. Funding was provided by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld (ZIF) and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.02.003 Received 2 July 2018; Received in revised form 7 February 2019; Accepted 7 February 2019 0304-422X/ © 2019 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/). Please cite this article as: Monika Krause, Poetics, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.02.003 M. Krause Poetics xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx concept highlights by departing from the historicist tradition, which makes strong assumptions about periods as coherent entities, tends to allocate one zeitgeist to one period, and assumes that zeitgeist is held together by the coherence of a set of ideas Three examples, which are somewhat removed from the more charged debates concerning labels for the contemporary moment, can illustrate the questions that the term uniquely raises: The culture of the baroque, the discovery of the unconscious, and the phenomenon of “1968” are candidates for cases of period-specific cultural patterns, which we can seek to describe or explain and which we can try to use to explain other phenomena: The first example would invite us to theorise the fascination with luxury and death in the 17th and 18th century across geographic contexts across Europe. Associated with the term “baroque” by later historians concerned with "high art", it is also present in the popular culture of the period (Maravall, 1986). Second, we can try to make sociological sense of the emergence of the idea of the unconscious in the middle-to-late nineteenth century among novelists, spirit-healers, and doctors. Accounts of the discovery of the unconscious often focus on the individual “Sigmund Freud” but a focus on this individual or on any one of these groups of “professionals” does not seem to do justice to the way this idea was born and spread. Third, we might ask what exactly was “1968” as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon? In a number of Western European countries the year 1968 is established as a shorthand for a broader political and cultural phenomenon, which includes the left, counter-cultural and youth movements of the 1960s, a phenomenon that is related to what US Americans call "the sixties", and to the challenges to authoritarian rule in Eastern Europe in the same period. I would suggest we explore the possibility that to capture in sociological terms what "1968" stands for it is not enough to describe a set of events, an explicit political ideology, or a social movement. Nor is it enough to point to a style of music or a set of clothes. Rather, the hypothesis would be that “1968” describes a set of practices that combine meanings and objects in certain ways - combinations, which we can recognise when we are confronted with material from that period even if we may debate the boundaries of the phenomenon and the relative importance of different com- ponents of it. In order to develop the term zeitgeist as a tool for sociological analysis that can capture these and other phenomena in analytically accountable ways, I will first offer a specification of zeitgeist and make the case that it can capture a distinctive set of phenomena by contrasting phenomena of zeitgeist with other cultural phenomena. I will then discuss the term's heritage in the historicist tradition. In contrast to historicist uses of the term, which are carried forward in contemporary analysis of the "current moment" in sociology, media studies, and cultural studies, I will question the assumption that one zeitgeist corresponds to one period of history. In dis- cussing the relationship between zeitgeist and historicism, I will build on and depart from the work of Mannheim (1952) [1928]), whose discussion of zeitgeist in the essay on "The Problem of Generations" is the classic reference point for modern sociological discussions of the concept. I will suggest that Mannheim did not go far enough in dissociating the term from its heritage by suggesting that two opposing zeitgeists define a period. He further limited the analytical potential of the term by reducing zeitgeists to social groups; by doing so, he precluded questions about the wide range of social and material carriers of cultural phenomena. I will argue that, dissociated from some aspects of the heritage of the term in the idealist philosophy of history, zeitgeists can be a conceptual variable among others and can become a research object, which can be examined with regard to different sets of properties: We can ask how zeitgeists extend in time and social space and by what media and socio-material carriers the patterns of a zeitgeist are held together. Throughout the paper, I will return to the examples of "1968", the baroque, and the discovery of the unconscious. Space does not permit me to do justice to these examples as empirical cases but they allow me to illustrate my argument in two directions. Firstly, they allow me to illustrate the distinction between period-specific cultural patterns on the one hand and enduring cultural patterns or group-specific patterns on the other hand. Secondly, they allow me to show the limits of historicist assumptions: The examples have been selected because, as a set, they illustrate the range of different ways in which cultural phenomena with a distinctive historical location relate to strong notions of periods as integrated cultural wholes on the one hand and to generations as presumed carriers of cultural forms on the other hand. 2.
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